GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH

The beach has a long and important role in the history of Australian art, touching on such diverse fields as ethnography and social history, and including more than its fair share of masterpieces. Colonial artist, Joseph Lycett's watercolours tell us about the fishing habits of the original inhabitants of the Newcastle beaches, and at the other end of the scale, bikinis and beach inspectors speak of a time when Sydney's beaches suffered a narrow mindedness that seems today hard to conceive. Other masterpieces (there are a whole line) of Australian impressionist paintings by Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder of Melbourne and Sydney beaches. Grace Cossington Smith, one of Australia's great twentieth-century women artists, showed her special interest in the beach when visiting Thirroul in 1931.

The brilliant colour and light, both material and spiritual, with which she endowed her still-life paintings, interiors and landscapes, were carried over into subject paintings and seascapes, rare as these latter works are. The pictorial quality and aesthetic beauty of such paintings as Sea Wave at Thirroul and Bulli Pier, South Coast, provide singular combinations of verisimilitude and abstraction, transcending both. When Grace Cossington Smith introduced figures, as in Sea at Thirroul, she challenged the best of her time and their enthrallment with beaches, bodies and beauty, as she looked beyond the merely physical in search of other verities. The recent death of her mother gave added meaning and feeling to this and related works. All the figures look seaward, to the horizon of hope and expectation, whereas a few years later in Charles Meere's Australian Beach Pattern (Art Gallery of New South Wales) the focus is the other way, all models of physical perfection. As one of Australia's greatest painters of still life, Grace Cossington Smith showed in Sea at Thirroul that she was an equally gifted mistress of movement.

A related small drawing exists in one of the artist's sketchbooks in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.